William And Mary: Helping The Healing

WILLIAMSBURG — Matt Roosevelt, who is FDR's great-grandson, is in a group that hopes to educate men about rape and sexual assault.

It's 5:45 on an unseasonably warm April afternoon in an upstairs meeting room at William and Mary Hall, where one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's great-grandsons talks about rape.

Matt Roosevelt, a senior honor student and co-captain of the William and Mary mens gymnastics team, stands with three fellow students delivering the message that men are not just the perpetrators of sexual assault. Men, they say, not only can aid in the healing process, but with greater knowledge and awareness can help prevent the act.

Roosevelt is comfortable and assured, the result of practiced experience and a receptive audience: his gymnastics teammates on this particular day. He speaks plainly and sincerely, clearly embracing the topic.

He later explains how a simple desire to become a better public speaker turned into a cause that he hopes will delay his entry into medical school and his eventual aim to become a doctor.

"I love being involved, and I love seeing the world change," he says.

Your first instinct when a friend tells you she's been raped or sexually assaulted, Roosevelt tells his audience, is to go get a 9-iron and 10 of your biggest friends and beat the hell out of the guy that did it. Noble sentiment, he says, but bad idea.

The woman is attempting to cope with one violent episode, he says. She doesn't need to deal with another.

When Roosevelt graduates this month, he will have left few stones unturned in his college life.

He carries a 3.8 grade-point average with a major in biology and recently was named Phi Beta Kappa. He was an integral part of the Tribe's gymnastics program for four years, serving as co-captain this season with fellow senior Jamie Northrup.

"He's such a hard worker in and out of the gym," said teammate Ramon Jackson, who won an NCAA title on the parallel bars this spring. "He's an excellent captain. He's the kind of guy who can carry you out of a funk at meets and get you focused on the next event."

Roosevelt participated in a couple of campus service organizations and served as a producer and editor for the campus TV station. He is part of the first recruiting class of W&M professor John Foubert, the founder and president of NO MORE, Inc., the National Organization of Men's Outreach for Rape Education, whose program is based out of William and Mary.

"He's the kind of person who feels like he has to be doing something extra with his life," W&M gymnastics coach Cliff Gauthier says.

Gauthier likens Roosevelt to one of his former gymnasts, Dave Brown, the astronaut killed in the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003.

"When I recruited him, I could tell that he was a super guy and I thought William and Mary matched up very well for him," Gauthier says of Roosevelt. "I didn't know the caliber of guy he was until I was around him day in and day out."

It may take years for a woman to recover from an act of sexual assault, Roosevelt says. Be there if your friend wants to talk, but the program strongly advises that she speak to a counselor or someone clinically qualified.

And as much as you may want to tell a friend in order to ease the burden on your own shoulders, he says, don't. To do so would betray a confidence for what is likely the most privately despicable act of someone's life.

If you really need to talk to someone, go to a counselor yourself. It doesn't mean you're crazy, he says, it just means that you need to talk.

In the fall of 2002, at the beginning of his junior year, Roosevelt says he was intrigued by a card tacked to the gymnastics room bulletin board seeking young men interested in working with a rape and sexual assault awareness group.

At the very least, he thought, working with such a group may make him a better public speaker. He interviewed with Foubert, an associate professor of higher education who was setting up a "One in Four" chapter on campus as part of his NO MORE organization.

The term "One in Four" refers to a study that claims one in four college women have either survived rape or sexual assault since their 14th birthday.

"Rape and sexual assault are the most deplorable acts one human can do to another," Roosevelt says. "If there was something we could do to prevent that, I thought it was worth listening to."

Two weeks after he interviewed with Foubert, Roosevelt says, a friend came to him and told him that she had been raped.

"That cinched it for me," he says. "I had to be a part of the program."

Roosevelt and the group's other three presenters, Will Carter, John Mallory and Nick Reiter, spent the fall of 2002 practicing. They began to give presentations in the spring of 2003, first on campus and then on other campuses and for other groups. Their audiences are almost exclusively male, under the premise that men are not just the problem, but must be part of the solution.